Protect the customer by changing who owns the loss
Between 2022 and 2025, fraud cases among Ghana's payment service providers nearly doubled. At a recent COCLAB workshop, Matilda Asante Asiedu, the Second Deputy Governor of the Bank of Ghana, presented that figure and advocated for a shift in both strategy and perspective. She is right regarding the modification.
Between 2022 and 2025, fraud cases among Ghana's payment service providers nearly doubled. In a recent COCLAB workshop, Matilda Asante Asiedu, the Second Deputy Governor of the Bank of Ghana, highlighted this statistic and proposed a change in both strategy and perspective. The Bank of Ghana attributes this rise to lower digital literacy among users, but the same Ghanaians are served by institutions that are vulnerable to the same scams and use the same phones. The concentration of fraud in payment service providers is a result of this faulty design.
Comparing the same four years in the financial system, while the number of fraud cases reported by banks decreased by 34%, the number of specialised deposit-taking institutions halved. This shift away from institutions with stronger defences to those with weaker ones is not an explosion of fraud, but a migration of weaknesses. The industry's rationale of lower digital literacy is therefore rendered obsolete.
To address this, the Bank of Ghana suggests adjusting the location of the loss. For instance, Britain has implemented a system where providers reimburse victims of authorised push-payment fraud up to £85,000 within five working days, with the cost shared between the transmitting and receiving firms. This shift makes each provider in the chain responsible for halting the mule account before it opens.
In Ghana, a cap of GH¢20,000 could cover the vast majority of cases (an average cost of GH¢4,000 for the 24,778 incidents worth GH¢101 million).
Other practical fixes include verifying the actual identity associated with the recipient's account before payment is made, implementing emergency blocks to secure wallets within ninety seconds, and creating a shared mule-account registry visible to all providers within an hour. These measures, which are not particularly uncommon, can be implemented to make fraud more costly for providers and deter such activities.
The fundamental action is to make fraud expensive for providers, which in turn will encourage them to fix the underlying design problems.
Written by urgent.news from Joy Business's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
